This study explores Jamaican secondary students’ perceptions of the impact of remote instruction on their learning. The arrival of the global COVID-19 pandemic on the shores of Jamaica in March 2020 (declared as such by the World Health Organization in the same month) resulted in a change from traditional face-to-face teaching to a remote modality. The study used convenience sampling to identify 28 urban and rural, male and female, 12-17-year-old secondary students across Jamaica’s 14 parishes. Semi structured questions and one-on-one telephone interviews  were used to collect data.

This paper explores how the COVID-19 pandemic can act as a lens for educators and scholars to more clearly define some of the issues hampering effective science education in one Caribbean territory. The pandemic clearly revealed certain phenomena in Trinidad and Tobago (T&T) including: the poor state of public scientific literacy; limited public understanding of the nature of science; an antagonistic dynamic with respect to public trust in science; and the lack of comprehensive remote/online pedagogical options for science.